Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, adapted from JK Rowling's novel, is
terrific entertainment in its own right, says Sukhdev Sandhu in the 2009
review

The first film adapted from JK Rowling's Harry Potter books, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson as the three leading characters, was released in 2001. The fifth film in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, came out in July 2009.

Even hardcore Hogwarts fans would admit that the HarryPotter films to date, though box-office hits, have not been a patch on the original novels by JK Rowling. In fact, they’ve been stuttering and gauche. The last one, 2007’s The Order of the Phoenix, was an especially tepid affair.

News that its director David Yates had signed on to complete the series didn’t augur well: wouldn’t the movies, now that all seven books have been published, feel dated and irrelevant? Haven’t they have been superseded in the hearts and minds of younger viewers by the success of the vampire series Twilight?

It’s with some incredulity then that I must tell you that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince not only stands head and shoulders above the previous five films, but that it’s terrific entertainment in its own right.

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The actors, who are getting on a bit and have been plotting post-Potter careers (Rupert Grint has starred in a couple of independent features, while Daniel Radcliffe has been shedding his clothes in a Broadway production of Peter Shaffer's Equus), come across as newly-liberated and energized, eager to give all they have to what’s left of the series. Yates too has had a rethink and a reboot.

Every new Harry Potter film tends to be heralded as the darkest one to date. The Half-Blood Prince really is heavy and gloomy. Right from the start, when sooty-black Death Eaters soar across the skies and into London, laying waste to the Millennium Bridge in the process, it’s clear that Yates, together with director of photography Bruno Delbonnel, wishes to steer the action away from its English boarding-school story roots and closer towards eerier, more grown-up fare such as Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).

The train-station platform from which Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) jettisons Harry (Radcliffe), who had been chatting up a café waitress, is less quaint than before. So is the creepy suburban home into which they march: it belongs to Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), a sad-eyed former Potions Professor at Hogwarts whom they hope to lure out of retirement in order to help them in their enduring battle against Voldemort.

The school itself is less of the fairy-tale playground than it used to be. There are security checks for concealed weapons at its front gates. Inside, the pupils have suddenly grown up into lanky, hormonal young adults who drink ale, get high on magic potions, and are eager to snog members of the opposite sex.

Harry himself is keen on Ginnie Weasley (Bonnie Wright), while Ron, much to the dismay of Hermione (Emma Watson), is getting cosy with Lavender Brown (a deliciously over-the-top turn by Jessie Cave).

The film is full of tricks and conceits that will delight Potter aficionados: the Pensieve through which Harry dips his head in order to be able to gaze at vital episodes from Voldemort’s youth; a Horcrux in which piece of the soul can be hidden.

Daniel Radcliffe

Strangely enough, it’s the less elaborate and more workaday scenes in which the teenagers of Hogwarts flirt and pout, just as normal teenagers spend their adolescences flirting and pouting, that are the most amusing and endearing.

That’s because many of us have grown up and grown older with these characters. They resemble friends and relatives as much as they do fictional creatures. It’s hard not to feel charmed and a kind of parental concern for Hermione, when, as someone so forceful in most aspects of her life, she becomes shy and nervous at the thought of telling Ron how much she likes him.

It wouldn’t do to over-stress the courting and cuteness in the Half-Blood Prince. Word is that Warner Brothers asked Yates to lighten up the action. As it is, Helena Bonham Carter as demented Bellatrix Lestrange comes across like a female version of Heath Ledger’s Joker. Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), more vicious than ever, stamps on Harry’s face.

The scene in which Harry and friends are attacked in a field by Death Eaters is as scary as M. Night Shymalam’s early films. Alan Rickman’s Severus Snape enunciates every syllable of every word with the coiled precision of an anaconda.

Working from such a lengthy novel it’s inevitable that writer Steve Kloves won’t be able to give some of the characters the screen time they deserve. I do wish though he could have found more room for Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall: her Scottish accent, together with the boarding-school setting, bring back happy memories of her performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969).

The difficulty of compacting so much material into a short time – the film is over 150 minutes long, but races by – means that the editing can veer towards the jerky and abrupt. What’s more, the banter between Harry, Hermione and Ron, here as in previous installments, often appears stiff and forced.

Still, what an odd situation the Half-Blood Prince creates. Four directors and six films into the series, it finally seems to have found its stride. It’s as confident, muscular and comic as its predecessors were puny and timid. And, for the first time, it has a genuine emotional tug.

Part of that sadness comes from its story. But it also stems from the likelihood that no printed book will ever generate the same fervour again. We have flocked in hope and in far to the Harry Potter films to check on how the novels we adore have been transformed from page to screen.

In the future, more and more books, especially those aimed at younger readers, will begin life on a digital screen. As a result, the promise of cinematic alchemy will surely wane. I find myself looking forward, with an unusually deep sense of imminent bereavement, to the final two films in the series.